Washington Talk; White House

By Bernard Weinraub, Special to The New York Times

Published: July 24, 1989

WASHINGTON, July 23—
George Bush thought the worst was over. After six months in the White House, the President plainly felt that Dan Quayle was moving successfully to repair the damage of the 1988 campaign that was stamped by those numerous miscues, those jokes about the Vice President's intellect, those criticisms that he was not quite up to the job.

Now the derisive comments have surfaced again, but not from Democrats who ridiculed Mr. Quayle in the campaign but from the advisers who coached him.

And an angry Mr. Bush (''He's on the ceiling; he's livid about it,'' said one senior White House aide.) and an angrier John H. Sununu, the White House chief of staff, have responded to the Republican disloyalists with some heavy verbal artillery, partly out of affection for Mr. Quayle and partly in a peremptory strike to warn any political consultants that if they want to remain on good terms with the White House, snide comments about Dan Quayle are off-limits.

What concerns the White House is, to some degree, the forthcoming release of books about the 1988 Presidential campaign. One them, by Jack Germond and Jules Witcover, quotes Quayle advisers like Joseph Canzeri and Stuart Spencer and party political pros like James H. Lake and Edward J. Rollins as depicting the Vice President as an inept campaigner who almost had to be treated like a child.

''The 1988 campaign didn't end when the White House hoped it would end: It's now being recycled through the literary process, and it's going to hurt Dan Quayle,'' said Kevin Phillips, a Republican political analyst. ''The effort to make Quayle look better in the last few months has achieved a certain low-threshold credibility that mostly depends on the things Quayle does that look like a decent performance and no negative news. This sets back the effort to repackage Quayle.''

In the Germond-Witcover book, called ''Whose Broad Stripes and Bright Stars? The Trivial Pursuit of the Presidency 1988'' (Warner Books), perhaps the harshest judgments of Mr. Quayle came from Mr. Canzeri, who assisted in the Vice President's campaign, worked at the Reagan White House and once served as an aide to Nelson A. Rockefeller.

Mr. Canzeri was quoted as saying that Mr. Quayle had the ''impatience of youth,'' and paid attention only to what he wanted to hear. Aides knew, Mr. Canzeri said, that the Senator would require a ''script.''

Mr. Bush, who read accounts about the book during his recent European trip, phoned Mr. Quayle to express his anger and told reporters that the comments about his Vice President were ''personally offensive'' and ''the ugly side of politics.''

Taking his cue from the President, Mr. Sununu told White House associates: ''Canzeri is persona-non-grata in the White House. He's history.''

Privately, some White House officials said the comments about Mr. Quayle were ''an obvious negative,'' a reminder of a Vice Presidential campaign whose embarrassing episodes linger instead of disappearing. Other officials are publicly revising history and blaming the Vice President's miscues on the very advisers who are ridiculing him now.

As David Beckwith, Mr. Quayle's spokesman, said, ''If the Vice President's lieutenants were behind his back trashing him to the news media, it's not surprising, is it, that he looked bad in print?''

''In a way, the Vice President feels that this proves what he had suspected: That some of the people imposed on him were not loyal to him,'' said William Kristol, Mr. Quayle's chief of staff.

Other Republicans say the Bush and Sununu messages were a calculated threat to Republican strategists to keep their mouths shut about Mr. Quayle. ''This is the very kind of thing that cuts Bush to the quick,'' said a prominent Republican close to Mr. Bush. ''The President was disgusted. He hates disloyalty, talking out of school. He kept calling the Quayle thing a cheap shot, a cheap shot. It was a lesson to Republicans.''